Former IIT Delhi director's list of 6 points to improve NIRF rankings

NEW DELHI: V Ramgopal Rao, former director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi has listed a few points to improve the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). He calls for the introduction of a parallel international NIRF ranking, a peer review process for authenticity, a two-year gap between rankings, autonomy for consistent winners and more. Rao shared his six points for improving the NIRF ranking on Twitter. "Here are the 6 pointers for #NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework), @EduMinOfIndia to further improve on the ranking framework. @dpradhanbjp @PMOIndia @narendramodi," he tweeted.

According to Rao, a parallel NIRF plus or international NIRF ranking to rank the top 50 institutions with the world's top 50 institutions will set higher goals for the educational institutions in India. "Time has come to create new goal posts now. Otherwise, it will be a sort of musical chairs at the top and will be a zero-sum game for the country," he said.

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Rao also suggested the introduction of a peer-review system in the NIRF ranking as many complaints surfaced regarding the authenticity of the data submitted. The low-ranking institutes should verify the data submitted by the higher-ranking institutes, he said. He also said that this will help those institutes learn best practices and improve their perfomance. He also called for conducting the rankings every two years, as this would give more time for peer review too. He also alleged that nothing much happened in just a span of one year.

Institutes could be getting different rankings based due to small differences in their scores. Rao said that such institutions should be assigned the same rank. He opined that ranking institutes differently based on minute differences will be demotivating.

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The former IIT Delhi director supported autonomy for institutions that consistently maintains top positions. He said that the IITs and NITs ranked among the top 10 institutes consistently for three years should receive full autonomy. According to him, without autonomy, these institutes will not be able to compete internationally. Rao also called for funded research and educational schemes for tier-1 institutions to collaborate with tier-2 institutions.